Bioethics
oracknows | March 18, 2009It's probably an understatement to say that I've been critical of the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM). Indeed, I consider it not only to be a boondoggle that wastes the taxpayers' money funding pseudoscience, but a key promoter of quackery. Worse, its promotion of highly implausible (one might even say magical) modalities gives these modalities a patina of scientific respectability that they do not deserve, especially given that, even under the most favorable conditions possible, they routinely fail to demonstrate any efficacy above and beyond that of a…
j7uy5 | March 17, 2009Dr. Richard
Friedman, professor of psychiatry at Weill Medical College of
Cornell University, has an article in the New York Times. In it,
he claims that reforms in medical residency training may be leaving
young doctors "a little more hesitant and uncertain than you might
like."
At first I was hesitant to write about it, because I was uncertain as
to what point he is trying to make. But then I decided to go
ahead.
href="http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/17/health/17mind.html?pagewanted=print">Accepting
the Risks in Creating Confident Doctors
By RICHARD A. FRIEDMAN, M.D.
Published: March…
oracknows | March 12, 2009Science as it is practiced today relies on a fair measure of trust. Part of the reason is that the culture of science values openness, hypothesis testing, and vigorous debate. The general assumption is that most scientists are honest and, although we all generally try to present our data in the most favorable light possible, we do not blatantly lie about it or make it up. Of course, we are also all human, and none of us is immune to the temptation to leave out that inconvenient bit of data that doesn't fit with our hypothesis or to cherry pick the absolutely best-looking blot for use in our…
terrasig | March 11, 2009Back in February 2007, we had a lively discussion on a post about pharmacist objection to filling prescriptions for drugs they felt went again their personal moral stance: from morning-after pills to garden-variety oral contraceptives. I held that since pharmacists are licensed by the state to provide a service to the citizenry (and they make about as much money as a full professor at a US research university), they should be required to fill prescriptions. Some commenters argued that ethical practice of one's profession dictate that one apply moral standards. I disagree. As an agent of…
rskloot | March 7, 2009
There's been lots and lots written about the ethics of commercially cloning dogs and other pets -- a practice I see as a prime example of extreme human idiocy. Who spends gazillions of dollars cloning a pet dog when it's widely known that (a) the resulting puppies won't be copies of the origianl dog, (b) they'll likely have health problems, and (c) there are SO MANY PUPPIES that need homes? The answer: Very disturbing people, that's who. (And it doesn't look like this problem is going away any time soon.) I say all of this to raise yet another issue I have with the commercial cloning of…
oracknows | March 2, 2009Over the weekend, some readers sent me a link to a story that, presumably, they thought would be of interest to me, given that I graduated from the University Michigan Medical School back in the late 1980s. Specifically, it's a report that U. of M. has halted the use of dogs in its surgical training:
Surgeons training at the University of Michigan Health System will no longer use live, healthy dogs to learn drastic surgical procedures that can save people's lives, the university announced Thursday.
The anesthetized animals -- obtained from shelters -- were used to teach tracheotomies, how to…
rskloot | March 2, 2009
The other day, the NY Times ran a story called "Picture Emerging on Genetic Risks of IVF. It reported on a new Centers for Disease Control study that found that children conceived through the most common infertility treatments had a slightly increased risk of several birth defects, including cleft palate and septal heart defects.  believe this is one of the largest studies looking into the connection between Assisted Reproductive Technology (ART) and birth defects, but it's not  the first. Â
Way back in 2003, I wrote a story for Popular Science called "Sally Has Two Mommies + One Daddy…
j7uy5 | February 19, 2009The NEJM has published a provocative article about the ethics of the
globalization of clinical trials. (The article is openly
accessible.) The big issue is this: clinical trials are very
expensive. It is cheaper to do them overseas, but this raises
questions of scientific integrity, as well as questions of ethical
integrity.
Ethical
and Scientific Implications of the Globalization of Clinical Research
Economic globalization is an important development of the past half
century. Proponents of globalization highlight the benefits of greater
economic growth and prosperity; critics point to the…
oracknows | February 17, 2009Unfortunately, as we have been dreading for the last four months or so since her relapse was diagnosed, my mother-in-law passed away from breast cancer in hospice. She died peacefully, with my wife and the rest of her family at her side. As you might expect, I do not much feel like blogging, and even if I did my wife needs me more. Because I foresaw this coming, however, I do have a series of "Best of" reposts lined up. If you've been reading less than a year or two, they're new to you. If not, I hope you enjoy them again. I don't know when I'll be back, other than maybe a brief update or two…
rskloot | January 22, 2009
There's a fascinating story in the new issue of The New Scientist about people's DNA being tested without their knowledge. Suspicious spouses are sneaking DNA samples from their partner's underwear; men and women are covertly testing their children to find out if they're really biologically related, and several companies have cropped up to help them. These tests -- and the companies performing them for a fee -- raise a lot of questions about genetic privacy (and come with some really weird photos) ...
"Test Infidelity is just one of dozens of US companies offering to
test DNA taken…
oracknows | January 22, 2009Being involved in clinical research makes me aware of the ethical quandaries that can arise. Fortunately for me, for the most part my studies are straightforward and don't provoke much in the way of angst over whether what I am doing is ethical or whether I'm approaching a line I shouldn't approach or crossing a line I shouldn't cross. However, there's lots of research that flirts with the unethical and sometimes even crosses the line. Institutional review boards are there to oversee the ethics of clinical trials and protect the human subjects who participate in them, but they don't always…
oracknows | January 19, 2009I almost feel sorry for homeopathy Jeremy Sherr. Almost. You see, he is busily learning a lesson that HIV/AIDS denialist Celia Farber learned a couple of weeks ago, namely that, unlike the fictional nation of Oceania in George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, memory holes do not work very well in the Internet age.
I'll backtrack a bit and explain. Last week, several readers sent me reports about a homeopath named Jeremy Sherr, who apparently in November went to Tanzania in Africa and has been busted by the skeptical blogosphere for proposing on his blog Jeremy's Journal from Africa completely…
sb admin | January 16, 2009
As some sharp-eyed reader may have already spotted, the SciencePunk blog has relocated to the Seed Media Group's ScienceBlogs. Let's take a moment to absorb these new surroundings.
OK, done? Those of you who have already run back to check sciencepunk.com will find it too has changed substantially. Drama abounds!
From today, the whole SciencePunk caboodle is getting cranked up a notch. Wave goodbye to the version 5 we all knew and loved, and say hello to version 6. (Ah, you always wondered what that stray /v5 signified, didn't you? Why not check out v4? Web 1.0-tastic!) The site has…
oracknows | December 26, 2008Welcome back. I hope you and yours who celebrate Christmas have had a happy one. Ours was kind of mixed and bittersweet for reasons that I don't particularly feel like going into now, although sooner or later I will probably have to say something about it. In the meantime, as much as I hate to be a downer right after the holidays, when many of my readers have the day off and are looking forward to hanging out with family or friends or maybe attacking the Boxing Day sales in the U.K. or just the sales in the U.S. and elsewhere. However, just before the holidays and shortly before I gave a…
oracknows | December 9, 2008My original post that asked the intentionally provocative question Was Nazi science good science? provoked a lot of comments, some of which made me think, which is good. This post was inspired by an article in which historian of the Nazi era Richard Evans was featured in a story about Nazi science and expressed his amazement at how much Nazi science was treated just like any other science, with little or no comment by other scientists of the era about the completely unethical and downright evil nature of the experiments, which reduced human beings to the status of laboratory animals, and…
oracknows | December 8, 2008In 2007, I wrote a series of posts about what I found to be a fascinating yet at the same time disturbing phenomenon, specifically self-experimentation by cancer patients using an as yet unapproved drug called dichloroacetate. If you'll recall, DCA is a small molecule drug that was used to treat congenital lactic acidosis in children through its inhibition of the enzyme pyruvate dehydrogenase kinase. This inhibition shifts the metabolism of glucose towards oxidative metabolism in the mitochondria and away from glycolysis, the product of which is lactic acid. In January 2007, Dr. Evangelos…
oracknows | November 28, 2008Believe it or not, sometimes even Orac has a life. I know, I know, between the ridiculously logorrheic blogging here and other online activities, coupled with even more ridiculous long hours working at his day job, it's hard to conceive. However, my wife and I had a whole passel of relatives over, several of whom spent the night. This puts a crimp in the blogging activity, but for once I don't care that much. Fortunately, there's a lot of good reading out there, of which I picked a few examples:
The "Gonzalez Trial" for Pancreatic Cancer: Outcome Revealed. Remember the Gonzalez trial? It was…
terrasig | November 16, 2008Picking up the Sunday paper after walking the PharmBeagle, I saw Dr Misha Angrist of the Duke University Institute for Genome Sciences & Policy featured on the frontpage of the local fishwrapper. Ace higher ed reporter, Eric Ferreri, put together a lovely article on this local hero. As Misha notes elsewhere:
In 2007 I became the fourth subject in Harvard geneticist George Church's Personal Genome Project. As the PGP moves forward, I am chronicling the dawn of personal genomics, that is, people obtaining their genomic information for whatever reason(s) and figuring out what to do with it…
oracknows | November 13, 2008Yesterday, I wrote about the sad case of Motl Brody, a 12-year-old Orthodox Jew whose brain tumor had rendered him brain dead and whose parents are fighting the efforts of the hospital to disconnect him from the ventilator and to stop all the powerful cardiac drugs that are keeping his heart beating and his blood pressure high enough because their religion tells them that death is defined by cessation of heartbeat and breathing. They do not accept the concept of brain death, even though they do accept that their child will never recover.
Yale neurologist and all-around skeptical guru Steve…
oracknows | November 12, 2008I realize that the title of this post might sound as though I'm equating brain death and fundamentalist religion. As tempting as it is sometimes to do so, I'm not. What I'm more interested in is a story I came across by way of ScienceBlogs Big Kahuna blogger P.Z. Myers last night, mainly because it brings up some serious ethical issues, aside from any religious issues. P.Z. tackled the story as he usually does tackle stories involving religion, with all the subtlety of a jack hammer in a glass factory.
I'm not saying that I'll necessarily be subtle, but I do have some actual, hands-on…